Was Biden right?

The advance of Islamic militants across Iraq has brought fresh criticism for the Obama administration — but may also deliver a grim measure of vindication to one very prominent White House official: Vice President Joe Biden.

In recent months, former officials and pundits have questioned and even ridiculed Biden’s foreign policy acumen.

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Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote in his memoir that Biden “was wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue of the past four decades.”

And former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s new book “Hard Choices” notes that Biden “remained skeptical” about launching the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 — and that others in the administration were at odds with Biden. “I thought we should go for it,” Clinton states, a contrast she has also drawn attention to on the road since leaving office.

This week paints Biden’s judgment in a far different light.

Recent events in Iraq call attention to his prediction nearly a decade ago that the war-torn nation was heading toward a breakup along sectarian lines — and to a prescription he offered to try to manage that reality by granting Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds greater autonomy over various parts of the country.

In other words: While Biden may have taken a beating repeatedly in recent years for some foreign policy calls he’s made, his judgment on Iraq’s capacity to stay united now looks almost prescient.

“Some will say moving toward strong regionalism would ignite sectarian cleansing. But that’s exactly what is going on already, in ever-bigger waves,” Biden wrote in a 2006 New York Times op-ed he co-authored. “Others will argue that it would lead to partition. But a breakup is already underway. As it was in Bosnia, a strong federal system is a viable means to prevent both perils in Iraq.”

A Biden representative declined to comment on whether Biden views himself as vindicated by the recent moves bringing Iraq closer to a breakup along sectarian lines. However, Biden’s co-author on the plan said it remains the last, best hope for saving the country from spiraling violence.

“It’s the only solution,” said Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The ship hasn’t sailed. It’s still a basis for doing something. … I don’t know if it will work. But in terms of what could work, it’s the only thing.”

Gelb said the plan was something of a flop after it was rolled out. It came to be branded as a call for “soft partition,” even though he said the intention was to preserve the country rather than see it splinter. Critics said it could even encourage ethnic cleansing.

Still, on the presidential campaign trail in 2007, Biden talked regularly about the idea. It even got a floor vote in the Senate, where a sense-of-the-Senate resolution he sponsored on “federalism” for Iraq passed, 75-23. (Clinton voted for the measure. Then-Sen. Barack Obama did not vote on it.)

But Gelb said Biden doesn’t appear to have pushed the idea after he became vice president.

“I don’t think he was outvoted. There just wasn’t any interest in it,” Gelb said. “The Middle East experts in Washington all pissed on it … which just fed into the criticism that we were calling for partitioning of Iraq.”

While President Barack Obama didn’t mention Biden’s plan Friday, the president did suggest that it was possible that the contrary idea of a security brought to bear by a strong central government in Baghdad may have been misplaced.

“The United States has poured a lot of money into these Iraqi security forces, and we devoted a lot of training to Iraqi security forces,” Obama told reporters at the White House on Friday.

“The fact that they are not willing to stand and fight and defend their posts against admittedly hardened terrorists, but not terrorists who are overwhelming in numbers, indicates that there’s a problem with morale, there’s a problem in terms of commitment, and ultimately that’s rooted in the political problems that have plagued the country for a very long time.”

The president added that the way forward in Iraq would require accommodating the different populations there, something Biden was stressing seven years ago.

And Obama called for “a serious and sincere effort by Iraq’s leaders to set aside sectarian differences, to promote stability and account for the legitimate interests of all of Iraq’s communities, and to continue to build the capacity of an effective security force.”

“In the absence of this type of political effort, short-term military action — including any assistance we might provide — won’t succeed,” the president said bluntly.